I had a discussion with some people today on hyphen and dashes. They had concluded that hyphen, which is used to link two connecting words (book-bag) is the longer line – instead of the shorter line -, and that the shorter line is for the dash, which is used to continue an argument/show something within a passage.

Is this true? Is there really a difference between the line length in the hyphen and dash symbols? I had always thought that they were of the same length.

3 Answers
3

Hyphen and dash are at least three distinct characters, and the hyphen is the shortest.

Hyphens “-” are primarily used in compound words (a 20-year-old co-ed) and when a word is broken at the end of a line (which explains why word breaking is called hyphenation). Hyphens are always very short, narrower than most letters. There is never a space between the hyphen and a word fragment that it joins (though there may be a space on one side in constructs like “pre- and post-conference activities”).

En-dashes “–” are mostly used to express a range (1932–1945). They are sometimes used as super-hyphens (a Los Angeles–New York flight). In these uses, there is no space before or after. They are so named because they are as wide as a lowercase “n” in most fonts.

Em-dashes “—” are sentence punctuation — often parenthetical — as shown in this sentence. They are at least as wide as an ”m”, occasionally even wider. There is no consensus as to whether to surround them by spaces.

Another similar character is the minus sign. It is typically about one en wide and thicker than a hyphen or dash, but this is dictated by the choice of mathematical font which can be chosen separately from the main text font.

There are many more somewhat similar characters and other uses of these characters; Wikipedia has a list as well as a lot of minutiae on these characters and their uses.

The hyphen ( ‐ ) is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. It should not be confused with dashes ( –, —, ― ), which are longer and have different uses, and with the minus sign ( − ) which is also longer.